With a positive raft of Kirsty MacColl re-issues
flooding out we take a retrospective look at this hugely underrated talent and
talk to long time collaborator Mark E Nevin about both the initial recording and
then remastering of Titanic Days - always referred to by MacColl as her 'sad
divorce album'.

Those
of you unacquainted with Kirsty MacColl’s short but eventful life may be unaware
that she was killed when hit by a speedboat travelling illegally through an area
where she was diving in Cozumel, Mexico, a freak boating accident that tragically
put paid to a fascinating and varied career. Not that the vast majority of the
music press ever truly recognised that variety, “the Times and Rolling Stone have
both got me down as an Irish folk singer,” she would witheringly sneer, “and I’m
always described as a ‘female singer-songwriter’. I mean, what’s your genitalia
got to do with it? You're either a singer-songwriter or you're not.” Which more
or less perfectly sums up the mercurial MacColl, passionate, funny and definitely
not afraid to speak her mind.

Almost
five years after her death the daughter of notoriously curmudgeonly and autocratic
folk singer Ewan, the female half of that extraordinary duet on Fairytale of New
York, easily the best Christmas single ever recorded and ex-wife of uber-producer
Steve Lillywhite, is still (as the previous few lines prove), a long way from
shrugging off her supporting role in the history of music. Which even a cursory
listen to her impressive back catalogue proves to be an idiotic historical oversight.

Beginning her music career in the late 70s as part of the Drug Addix - whose 1978 EP
Make A Record is Kirsty’s earliest recording - Kirsty was spotted by Stiff Records’
Dave Robinson and in 1979 released her debut solo single on Stiff, They Don’t Know
About Us (later covered to more money spinning effect by Tracy Ullman). Marrying
producer Steve Lillywhite in the mid ‘80s (they had two children), MacColl was
consequently heard on albums from Van Morrison and the Stones to the Talking Heads
and The Smiths.

The album’s, Kite (‘89) and Electric Landlady (’91) saw musical relationships with
various Pogues and Johnny Marr and also introduced her to ‘that bloke with the hat
in Fairground Attraction’ Mark Nevin with whom she recorded her fourth album, Titanic
Days, released on ZTT in 1994, an experience Nevin revisited with mixed emotions when he returned for
remastering duties ten years later.
“It was a difficult time for us both personally,” Nevin recalls, “but making it was
sometimes great fun. Kirsty and I would be huddled over the desk, not talking for
hours at a time until one of us would crack a joke that would make the other completely
crack up. It was like a joke competition. There was a tremendous warmth between us.”
There was some detective work needed to trace some of the demo's for the expanded 2nd CD
(“I couldn't actually find the master tape for the two demo's that I had, they ended up
in my sisters attic in Bristol and initially I was worried they would fall apart but
fortunately they lasted long enough to put into the Mac”), but the end result was, and
still is a fine album, leaping joyfully across style and genre boundaries with gleeful
abandon and remains a credit to both parties.

In the late 90s Kirsty spent more time with her children and began
travelling, sometimes heading off for two-week jaunts through Brazil where she would
pick up the rhythms that would inform all of her later work. She also moved into
television work writing songs for French & Saunders and recording theme songs for
programmes like Moving Story and Picking Up The Pieces. She released her final album
Tropical Brainstorm (V2, 2000), and several short months later she was dead. Asked if
he found it frustrating that Kirsty now appears to be having something of a renaissance
when she was largely ignored when alive Mark Nevin expressed mixed emotions.“I would
find it more frustrating if her music had never been acknowledged, [but] it still
is undiscovered as far as I am concerned. There is no-one to touch her these days.”

Thanks to Ian Peel for extra research

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